The following description is provided to assist the understanding of the reader. None of the information provided is admitted to be prior art.
Monitoring the concentration of oxygen in liquids and gases is required in many fields. For this reason, oxygen sensors or analyzers find a wide variety of applications. For example, biomedical applications use various types of oxygen sensors to detect and measure the oxygen content of liquid blood samples and physiological gas samples; chemical applications include manufacturing processes that require measurement of oxygen such as in the beer brewing process or during manufacture of dyes and paints, and environmental applications include monitoring oxygen levels in marine ecosystems, and in power plants.
Despite having a broad range of applications, oxygen analyzers and sensors that are currently available suffer from disadvantages such long detection times, low sensitivity, limited accuracy, limited life of the sensor and ability to detect oxygen selectively in one physical form or the other (i.e. either liquid or gaseous).
Porphyrins are macrocyclic molecular compounds having a ring-shaped tetrapyrrolic core which is capable of forming complexes with metal ions. Metalloporphyrins are complexes including various derivatives of porphyrins, generally in their dianionic form, coordinated to a metal ion. This coordination of a metal ion with a porphyrin nucleus leads to compounds which are analogous to several important biological compounds such as, but not limited to, hemoglobin, chlorophyll, cytochromes and the like.